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Maira Kalman tackles Jefferson and Monticello. The piece doesn’t change my opinion of Jefferson: terrible president, massive hypocrite, astonishing mind. Nor of Kalman*: national treasure. But it’s well worth the time.
* Are we related? Perhaps distantly? I’d like to think so.
The Edge of the American West 
57 comments
June 26, 2009 at 8:24 am
kid bitzer
1) monticello is really, really small. interesting, yeah, intricate, yeah, curiously inwrought, yeah. but small. and, to my mind, disappointing in that regard.
2) the final exchange of letters with john adams shows a jefferson who has stopped thinking. he has certain idees fixes to which he recurs. it is only somewhat unfair to compare him to a talk-radio jock. meanwhile, john adams is still fully mentally alive and vibrant. and far more intimate, and unrehearsed; he makes strenuous, sincere attempts to communicate with jefferson at a personal level. jefferson broadcasts back to him more pre-printed broadsides for the dittoheads of posterity.
it is certainly unfair to judge jefferson by his last works, when he had done better work earlier. but i do, nonetheless.
3) he not only had children by sally hemmings. he also had those children wait on his table. visitors commented on the awful shock of being served by a tall, dark-skinned copy of jefferson, whom jefferson did not acknowledge.
it is not fair to call him “complicated”, when the proper phrase is “sick fuck”.
4) i’m nonetheless surprised to read that he and his wife read tristram shandy. some contemporaries, e.g. doctor johnson, thought the book was simply indecent, not fit for polite company, much less one’s wedded wife.
5) moira kalman is one of my favorite literary and cultural figures in the whole world right now. i’m in love with her. and why is she writing these entire book-length essays for the nytimes, when they could be entire book-length books? i feel very fortunate; she is generous; why?
June 26, 2009 at 8:40 am
ari
On points 1-5, you are correct, sir. Though I don’t think there’s really any need to judge Jefferson on his end-of-life correspondence with Adams. I suppose we’d all like to remain vibrant intellects to the very end. But not everybody can. (Some of us aren’t so vibrant right now, iykwimaityd.) And anyway, the jury had, by then, long since returned its verdict: guilty of ideological asshattery and moral inconsistency.
By the way, have you read read this? I have all manner of cavils (about storytelling, mostly), but it’s an astonishing book.
June 26, 2009 at 8:44 am
ari
Also, I don’t know why Kalman does what she does for the Times. My guess is that it puts food on her table, while allowing her to work on bigger projects. But that’s just a guess. She hasn’t returned any of my fan mail. And I fear that she’d be put off if I began rifling through her trash for clues.
June 26, 2009 at 8:51 am
ari
Oh, one more thing: what I love about Kalman’s work, in addition to her fantastic art and amazing eye for quirky detail, is her breathless love of American history. There’s something incredibly charming about an artist and writer who forsakes overt irony — mostly — in favor of wonderment, while still never appearing naive. It’s just…wow.
June 26, 2009 at 9:05 am
ari
“Breathless” might be the wrong word. But I still can’t come up with anything better. Because some of us aren’t so vibrant right now.
June 26, 2009 at 9:05 am
ari
How many comments can I post in a row? I’ll call Vegas to get the over-under.
June 26, 2009 at 9:07 am
kid bitzer
right–while at the same time, she is also a master of irony, sarcasm, put-ons, outright snark, etc.
she can do dead-pan like nobody’s business (witness ‘max in love’ passim.) but when she puns on ‘so moved’ in the de toqueville piece, you can tell she really is so moved, by participatory democracy.
about the book on the hemings: no, i haven’t read it. looked at it, but it didn’t have enough pictures. i’ll stick with kalman.
June 26, 2009 at 9:20 am
ari
We could start a website extolling her virtues, yes?
June 26, 2009 at 9:21 am
kid bitzer
leave moira kalman aloooone!
June 26, 2009 at 9:21 am
ari
Her site is nice. And here’s her fan club. We can do better!
June 26, 2009 at 9:30 am
Anderson
Glad to see better-informed people than myself underwhelmed by Jefferson.
Query: Joseph Ellis: lied re: Vietnam service but otherwise good pop historian (as opposed to “historian of Michael Jackson”), or generally tainted as to credibility & to be avoided?
June 26, 2009 at 10:03 am
politicalfootball
1) monticello is really, really small. interesting, yeah, intricate, yeah, curiously inwrought, yeah. but small. and, to my mind, disappointing in that regard.
I had the same reaction to Graceland. I wonder if Neverland will also disappoint.
June 26, 2009 at 10:13 am
RobinMarie
“And anyway, the jury had, by then, long since returned its verdict: guilty of ideological asshattery and moral inconsistency.” I think this sums it up pretty well. Something that has annoyed me about popular understandings of Jefferson, and something that Kelman does here, is that his “complexity” is only discussed in terms of the slave holding, whereas Jefferson was pretty damn enraging in many other ways that surpassed his other, equally-slave-owning colleagues.
Anderson — I have no idea if Ellis should be avoided, although I haven’t heard anyone claim that his problem with honesty has crept into his work. But I’ll always have an appreciation for his work nonetheless, because as cliche as this sounds, I casually read Founding Brothers late in high school, was enraptured with Adams, and that was pretty much what got me into history as a life pursuit. So pop historians can do a lot a good, although the whole Vietnam thing is just plain bizarre.
June 26, 2009 at 10:16 am
eric
Our department has an unusual concentration of Jefferson-skeptics.
June 26, 2009 at 10:30 am
ari
That’s a pretty uncharitable reading of what I wrote, Robin, perhaps informed by your pre-existing frustration. When I called Jefferson a hypocrite, I wasn’t only referring to the issue of slavery. I was thinking, too, about his small-government ideology, which often conflicted with his huge government policies: the acquisition of Louisiana and, far more troubling, a second war with Britain (which he wanted to fight on the cheap).
June 26, 2009 at 10:45 am
human
Ooh, ari, make a post about The Hemingses of Monticello! Please? I don’t know if you mean “astonishing” in a good or a bad way – I loved it, personally, though not completely uncritically of course. But it did kick some serious ass, that book.
June 26, 2009 at 10:50 am
ari
“Astonishing” in a good way. That said, I’m afraid that I’m working on an essay about it and some other recent Jefferson books, so I’m not really in a position to post the material here. But! The commission well might fall through, in which case, I promise that I’ll share what I’ve got.
June 26, 2009 at 10:51 am
RobinMarie
Opps, Ari, I meant KAlman. Sorry :/.
June 26, 2009 at 10:55 am
JPool
I was really annoyed by her “It is a miserable part of the story, but it is not the whole story” let’s-get-back-to-being-enchanted manuever. It is an aspect of her unironic love of historical figures, though, and part of what make these meditations compelling. As professionals I think we can get a bit too used to seeing our subjects as deeply flawed and at least partly horrible people, so we can forget just how dizzying it can be to try and actively balance the repugnant and the sublime in engaging personally with their characters (I’m fascinated by Nkrumah, but I don’t have any desire to attend a garden party with him).
June 26, 2009 at 11:00 am
ari
What would a garden party with Nkrumah be like, I wonder? I once had tea with Stalin: quiet, well mannered, pretty nice guy.
June 26, 2009 at 11:00 am
ari
No worries, Robin. I’m delighted to be confused with her.
June 26, 2009 at 12:29 pm
JPool
That’s the thing, he was brimming with charisma. Pretty much anyone whoever met him or even saw him describes him as incredibly charming and engaging. It’s more the imaginative exercize of somehow going back in time to meet someone who you know is going to charm the socks off you, knowing that they are or will become the person who also builds a one-party state and imprisons his political opponents, and later everyday grumblers. And of course at the same time he was an amazing leader who accomplished a great deal of unalloyed good for his country.
June 26, 2009 at 12:29 pm
grackle
So is the deal that Jefferson was repugnant in-so-far-as-he-may-have-been-seen as a major hypocrite by his peers in ideological asshattery and moral inconsistency, or is there some anachronistic judgmentthat informs the view?
I like Kalman’s gentleness in using “complexity.” To me it acknowledges our fragile ability to understand the parameters of that removed world. Not excusing here but anyway wondering.
June 26, 2009 at 12:58 pm
kid bitzer
i’ve always been irritated by his irresponsible talk of periodic revolution “watering the soil of liberty with the blood of patriots” or however the quote goes.
that is not the outlook of a statesman. it’s too close to thecheap left-bank enthusiasm for the cultural revolution.
June 26, 2009 at 1:10 pm
eric
Jefferson himself saw himself as a hypocrite in substance for buying Louisiana.
June 26, 2009 at 1:16 pm
eric
Previously.
June 26, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Percy Percy
Um, Ari, sorry to disappoint you but Kalman is her married name. She’s the widow of Tibor Kalman, a giant figure in late-twentieth-century graphic design. I used to think Maira was piggybacking on Tibor’s fame, but I’ve been disabused of that notion. She’s responsible for two of my all-time favorite New Yorker covers–a woman wearing an Easter bonnet and of course the map of New York-istan.
June 26, 2009 at 1:44 pm
bitchphd
i’m nonetheless surprised to read that he and his wife read tristram shandy. some contemporaries, e.g. doctor johnson, thought the book was simply indecent, not fit for polite company, much less one’s wedded wife.
Dude, *everyone* read that book. Johnson’s complaint was in part *because* wives and other ladies were reading it like crazy.
June 26, 2009 at 4:14 pm
ari
So, PP, then I’m related to “a giant figure in late-twentieth-century graphic design.” I’m practically design royalty! I knew it, I just knew it.
June 27, 2009 at 6:03 am
Leinad
‘Long-beaked echidna’
Beaked? our monotremes are weird enough as it is without exaggerating…
June 27, 2009 at 8:12 am
Ben Alpers
I had the same reaction to Graceland.
Me, too…at least initially.
In hindsight I came to realize that its surprising smallness (and junkiness) taught me more about Elvis than I had expected to learn from the visit.
June 27, 2009 at 9:43 am
kid bitzer
fair enough, b. i was not surprised merely by the fact of her reading it.
i should have said that i was surprised by their reading it together, by their treating it as a quasi-devotional text, by their taking the sentiment seriously.
copying out lines by hand while on one’s death-bed? doing it without irony? not shandian.
June 27, 2009 at 9:52 am
stevenattewell
And this is why I’m a Tom Paine fan. Too many of the official “Founding Fathers” are either slave-holders, New England anti-democrats (why I dislike John Adams), or have some really bizarre flaw even though they’re generally likable (why was Franklin so anti-German?).
But Paine kept it real.
June 27, 2009 at 10:27 am
kid bitzer
why is being anti-german a flaw?
perhaps franklin despised them for being beer-sodden oafs. that’s part of why nietzsche is so anti-german. (and surely nietzsche has no flaws.)
June 27, 2009 at 10:36 am
eric
Franklin thought Germans were swarthy.
June 27, 2009 at 11:52 am
kid bitzer
“so earthy,” he said, “so earthy.” not “swarthy.”
it’s amazing how often franklin is misquoted on this score.
June 27, 2009 at 6:36 pm
TF Smith
“Terrible” president? Really?
Picking up a big chunk of the continent at a bargain price would seem a reasonable reputation-maker…
Me, I like Sam Adams. Hard to not like someone who brewed beer for a living (albeit unsucessfully) even if only for a while…
June 27, 2009 at 6:57 pm
ari
Yes, TF, terrible. Moving the nation toward a war of choice with England, a war designed to score political points, while refusing to fund a proper military (especially a navy), is not the stuff of legends. And the Louisiana Purchase was a truly magnificent act of hypocrisy for a small-government idealogue — not to mention very likely unconstitutional. And there’s more. Terrible, just terrible.
June 27, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Robert Halford
Wait, are you saying that you think that the Louisiana Purchase was in fact probably unconstitutional, or just that it was inconsistent with TJ’s principles? That the Louisiana Purchase was hypocritical for Jefferson is obviously right, that it was unconstitutional is extremely doubtful.
I mean, I think most American lawyers think that American Ins. Co. v. Canter was obviously correct, and that the right to make the purchase was inherent in the treaty power and in the United States’s existence as a sovereign nation. This is partly because all American lawyers are socialized to be fans of John Marshall and to think that Jeffersonian strict constructionism was a crock. But it’s also because it’s hard to conceive of a meaningful constitution that wouldn’t contain any implied powers at all, and once you’ve conceded that point it’s hard to see how the power to make the purchase wouldn’t be implied by the existence of the treaty power and of the status of the US as a sovereign nation.
June 27, 2009 at 9:07 pm
ari
Sorry, I put that poorly. I meant that Jefferson himself had doubts about the constitutionality of his purchase, which, you know, raises some red flags about his intellectual honesty. Beyond that, I used to know the literature on whether the purchase was actually — as opposed to in Jefferson’s addled brain — constitutional but I’ve long since intentionally forgotten all that.
June 27, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Robert Halford
Got it. By the way, can’t wait to read your essay on the Hemingses of Monticello — an amazing book that really changed my (not very well-informed) sense of the history of the South, but also one that I found kinda frustrating.
June 27, 2009 at 10:52 pm
grackle
So,if I’ve got this right, Jefferson was the Strunk and White of presidents? I was so misled in my youth.
June 28, 2009 at 1:14 am
eric
“Tommy got it right on Louisiana.”
— Ari Kelman
June 28, 2009 at 6:33 am
ari
Yeah, I knew you were going to do that, eric. And fair enough, of course (hoist upon a petard of one’s one making). Still, Alan’s new book manuscript has convinced me that Jefferson’s doubts about the inconsistencies between his, Jefferson’s, own rigid ideology and his policies were far more glaring and important than I had previously understood. I’ve reached knew levels of Jefferson loathing as a result. That said, I still think buying Louisiana was a good idea. But I’m not sure I get a vote.
June 28, 2009 at 6:33 am
ari
Also, what were you doing up in the dead of night?
June 28, 2009 at 6:36 am
ari
Also also, the blog was a better place back then (mostly because Michael Jackson was still alive to inspire us to do our best work; really, the world was a better place then). And also also also, that’s still my favorite post ever, I think. Napoleon’s Montreal East accent is perfect. I bet he loved smoked meat sandwiches.
June 28, 2009 at 10:05 am
eric
So wait, you’re persuaded by a book by Alan Taylor but not a blog post by me? What kind of new-media pioneer are you?
June 28, 2009 at 10:20 am
ari
Well, he has footnotes. Lots and lots of footnotes.
June 28, 2009 at 10:47 am
TF Smith
What if they were endnotes? Would they have been as persuasive?
From the prospect of multiple tenure track positions at land-grant colleges alone, I would expect historians would be supportive of the Louisiana Purchase, along with all of the other treaties, purchases, wars, and annexations that made the AHA what it is today…
June 28, 2009 at 10:49 am
Walt
If they’re not links to Wikipedia entries then they’re worthless.
June 28, 2009 at 1:27 pm
ben
Endnotes are never as persuasive as footnotes, because they’re much more of a bitch toread.
June 28, 2009 at 4:40 pm
dance
Having finally gotten around to reading this, I am obliged to say that I also was *really* annoyed by “It is a miserable part of the story, but it is not the whole story”. But inasmuch owning slaves enabled pretty much everything else she lauded—who built the house, and the university, and hung the paintings and tended the figs? So *isn’t* it the whole story? I was also piqued by her leaving slaveowner out of the laundry list of occupations at the beginning. He wasn’t a farmer, as we imagine the word today. Hmm, I am getting madder the more I think about it.
However, the Levy family who bought and saved the house—what did it mean from 1830 to 1920 to have Jewish people living on a Virginia estate in Jefferson’s house? that’s what I wanna know, now. (There are a few answers here, but I bet there’s a dissertation project there about anti-semitism and public memory)
By the way, are there other historians out there holding the line by demanding footnotes from students? I could use some company.
June 28, 2009 at 5:21 pm
TF Smith
Dance – I think Kammen and Urofsky beat you to it.
And how can you require a paper of any type and not expect footnotes?
June 28, 2009 at 5:36 pm
ari
I think Dance probably means as opposed to endnotes or paranthetical citations.
June 28, 2009 at 5:38 pm
ari
Also, Hosmer’s book talks quite a bit about the preservation of Monticello, Dance. I’m pretty sure the Levys figure prominently in the discussion, but my books are currently on the other side of the country, so I can’t say for sure.
June 28, 2009 at 6:51 pm
dance
I figured Monticello’s page would have cited dedicated books if they existed, but now that I write that down, I’m not sure why, or how I missed that the page author had linked to the book he wrote, despite checking for “Further Reading”. Or why I assumed anything related to Jefferson might not yet have been done to death. (TF, they didn’t beat *me* to it—I’m done and not an Americanist anyhow). Though I’ve been to more than one Jeffersonian shrine without ever hearing of the Levys.
Yes, footnotes as opposed to endnotes (etc), following the existing theme.
June 28, 2009 at 7:07 pm
dance
While I’m hating on Jefferson:
“His friend, the Polish Freedom Fighter Tadeusz Kosciuszko, left money in his will to be given to Jefferson to free and educate his slaves. But the task was overwhelming and he did not get it done.”
Seriously? that is one of the more trifling things I’ve ever heard. “Here, I’ll buy you free from your hypocrisy.” “Eh, too much trouble, think I’ll just pocket the money and screw your deathbed wish.” Also not part of the common story.